For the first time, more Americans get news from social media than from any other source, and they’re increasingly turning to creators they trust for information about elections, health care, their local communities and more.
As audiences rely on creators, they’re also looking for ways to tell what’s trustworthy. How does this creator handle political endorsements, paid partnerships, gifted products, AI use, corrections? Transparency about those choices is one of the clearest signals a creator can offer. It’s how audiences decide who has earned their trust, and it’s how creators establish ethical standards for information-focused work.
We’re not here to tell you what your standards should be. We’re working to create a framework to help you decide what you want to be accountable to for your audience and your partners, and we need your input to shape what we build.
How a creator handles political endorsements or paid opportunities doesn’t have one right shape. A travel creator partnering with tourism boards needs different language to share their ethics with audiences than a parenting creator who occasionally amplifies a candidate that supports policies important to them. Creators need language that’s clear and audience appropriate.
That’s why News Creator Corps is teaming up with Project C and Trusting News to conduct research with creators on how they work, how their audiences expect to be communicated with, and how their partners and sponsors evaluate trust.
We come at this from three different angles. News Creator Corps invests in information-focused, accuracy-minded creators, and has trained 50 fellows across 22 states in fact-checking, sourcing, verification, and ethics. Trusting News has spent nearly a decade helping newsrooms earn trust by being transparent about how their work gets done, and now brings that expertise to creators. Project C supports hundreds of journalists building sustainable, audience-driven media ventures outside traditional institutions.
At the end of this research, NCC, Project C, and Trusting News will analyze what you told us and create a framework and tools to help creators build ethics standards that make sense for their work and their audiences to increase transparency and trust.
To do this, we’re asking that creators fill out this survey by August 30.
We’ll also run focus groups in September to dig deeper into the survey results. Participants will receive $100. If you’d like to take part, you can indicate your interest in the survey.
We’re grateful to the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism for funding this project.